First baby furniture acquisition: check!
By bunny
I have been looking at Arm’s Reach Co-Sleepers for almost as long as I have been interested in co-sleeping. They address all the safety concerns the experts seem to have and also don’t require a complete upheaval of our current sleeping space. And even full price, they are very reasonable as long as you don’t feel a need for the super pretty hard wood ones. Not that I wouldn’t mind the Cambria model…but we’re on a tight budget with one and a half modest salaries plus a graduate student, and I think both of us also agree that the baby gear industry is pretty out of control in our culture. Besides, I have a strong innate thrift drive anyway. Which brings me to this week’s find for Little Bunmon.
In the middle of researching the vast, complicated, colorful world that is today’s cloth diapering systems, I somehow got distracted by looking at Arm’s Reach Co-Sleepers again this week. On a lark I thought I would check the local Craigslist ads to see if anyone might have one for sale. I really didn’t expect to find any in Corvallis, and I also wasn’t (and still am not) sure if buying such a thing secondhand was the best plan. But not only was there one right here in River City, it was advertised as never used except for storage and available for about a third of the retail cost. I didn’t even mind the style and colors: a cocoa/fern ClearVue Co-Sleeper.
I brought up the cosleeping idea with Monkey this afternoon–we had talked about it a little bit last year but I wasn’t clear on his level of comfort with it–and showed him the model on the Arm’s Reach site and then the Craigslist ad, explaining why I thought it might be a good match for us. He looked over the Arm’s Reach product description as well as some Baby Gear Lab reviews on their favorite Arm’s Reach Model, the [Mini-Arc-Co-Sleeper](http://www.babygearlab.com/Bassinet-Reviews/Arms- Reach-Mini-Arc-Co-Sleeper/). We talked a little about how the portability and play yard feature of the latter might be worth the extra expense, but Monkey’s idea was that either way we could go pick this up for $50, have several months to install and play with and think about it, and if we decided we wanted something else, we could just turn around and resell this for the same price in the same condition.
So basically Monkey was, to my not-uncommon surprise, like “Let’s do this.” I then emailed the Craigslist guy, who was like “Can we do this today?” Two hours later we found out that the cosleeper fit perfectly into the back of our Kia Spectra5, so we didn’t even have to disassemble/reassemble it. It appeared to be in great condition, and the couple we bought it from were very nice and glad to have it off their hands. It turned out they had only used it a couple of times, because their baby pretty much ended up all the way in their bed very quickly–something I won’t be terribly surprised if it happens to us. Either way, though, it gives us options and provides a guardrail if nothing else.
It was smaller than I had envisioned, which is good because we were a little worried it would block access to my closet. Instead, it fits perfectly in the space we have. We spent about half an hour attaching it to the bed as soon as we got home, which is done with two straps that buckle on either side of the cosleeper frame and are fed under the bed to a square plastic card on the other side, and then cinched up with cinchy things (I say like a brastrap, Monkey says like a backpack). It seems very secure although there is a mysterious small front loop that seems ill-placed to feed the straps through as the written instructions indicate, and the official video instructions act as if they don’t exist…something that may inspire an email to their customer service.
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It is detachable at the buckles and on rollers so it can be easily moved around (although for some reason we carried it all the way in). It has a great storage compartment underneath as well, and mesh pockets on the side. Next steps:
- figuring out what to put in it to communicate early on to Linus that THIS IS NOT A BED FOR HIM and 2) finding out if there prettier fitted sheets to buy for it with all that money we saved!